The end of summer months unfortutely drawing to an end, but we have some great tutorials and web articles you can read through as its get colder. This month we have compiled some great Photoshop and illustrator tutorials certainly worth trying out. There’s some really good articles we have included about understanding critical CSS, and some really good tips for creating a portfolio website.

I hope you like this months roundup, if we have missed anything from this months roundup please do share in the comments below.

Photoshop

The latest Photoshop update comes with a couple of pretty awesome new layer style features, such as multiple layer style instances and stroke overprint. This tutorial will show you how to use those features to create a one-layer-only, retro text effect.

The Photoshop tutorial we’re going to create a cool portrait effect using a long passage of text that bends and deforms around the contours of the face. Known as a Calligram, this effect is particularly powerful when used to present famous quotes or speeches by depicting the author/speaker with the actual words. Photoshop’s Displace filter is the key ingredient in this recipe which allows us to accurately wrap the text around the subject.

In this tutorial, Photoshop guru Fabio Sasso demonstrates a straightforward way of transforming a scene from a straightforward daytime shot to a dynamic night-time urban landscape through clever use of blending modes, brushes and plenty of carefully applied Gaussian Blur.

Clipping a subject from its background in Photoshop has to be the most common task a designer will encounter in their every day working life. The pen tool is the go-to tool for cutting most things out, but there’s some cool techniques you can use for hair, fur and other specialty subjects. So let’s crack on and look at the tools we have available to us in Photoshop.

Hey everyone, my name is Tanita and today we will be creating a cartoon skull sticker vector in Adobe Illustrator using various tools like the Shape tool, the Pen tool, and we’ll also get familiar with the pathfinder window.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create four types of donuts in Adobe Illustrator. We’ll start with the base, which is a classic plain donut, and then we’ll use this one to create the four variations: chocolate sprinkles, icing with chocolate chips, plain sugar, and strawberry frosted. The great news is that we will also use the same Scatter Brush to create all the decorations on the donuts.

In the video tutorial we’re going to have some fun in Adobe Illustrator constructing a cool bearded hipster character out of simple vector shapes. Using basic shapes not only makes the process much easier, it also gives your artwork that trendy stylized look that’s popular with pro illustrators.

Brighten The web is slow, yet there are a few simple strategies to make websites faster. One of them is inlining critical CSS into the of your pages, yet how exactly do you do it if your site contains hundreds of pages, or even worse, hundreds of different templates? You can’t do it manually. Dean Hume explains an easy way to get it done. If you’re a seasoned web developer, you might find the article obvious and self-explanatory, but it’s a good piece to show to your clients and junior developers for sure. — Ed.

Good responsive web design, by its nature, goes unnoticed to those consuming content online. So when someone asks for a new website, they’re often completely unaware of the concept, despite experiencing it on a daily basis. And yet, responsive website design is now acknowledged as standard practice throughout the industry.

There’s no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn’t require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today’s SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.

CSS floats and clears define web layout today. Based on principles derived from centuries of print design, they’ve worked well enough — even if, strictly speaking, floats weren’t meant for that purpose. Neither were tables, but that didn’t stop us in the 1990s.